They crawled on board--a pale, haggard, famished lot--and I was kept very busy for a time ministering to their wants. They ate steadily for an hour. Even with this rescue a greater catastrophe than all came near happening. Becalmed and by means of a treacherous current we were being rapidly carried toward an enormous rock, which towered sentinel-like alone a mile or more from the north end of the island. It reached full five hundred feet toward the clouds. Its perpendicular sides seemed built up in artificial layers. Toward this the _Henry_ seemed helplessly drifting, and the “Old Man,” under the influence of combined anger and despair, jumped up and down in his tracks and howled on the quarter-deck as he saw the voyage approaching such an unfortunate termination. Fortunately a providential or accidental breeze came off the land just in time to give us steerage-way. We trifled no more with Guadelupe, but sailed straight away for our old harbor. As we passed the last of these towering sentinel rocks at dusk, we heard from them the howling and barking of what, judged by the sound, might have been ten thousand seals. It was as the roaring of a dozen combined menageries. Had Virgil of old ever sailed by such a sound, he would have pulled out his stylus forthwith, and written of the Æneid an extra chapter about some classical hell afloat. These seals were howling at our discomfiture. The rock was half veiled in a mist in which we could indistinctly see their countless forms seemingly writhing and tumbling about. CHAPTER XI. AT THE GOLD MINES. After a ten months’ cruise we went back to San Francisco with 500 barrels of oil and ten tons of abalones. My share of the proceeds amounted to $250, having shipped on a “lay.” Mine was the fifteenth lay, which gave me one barrel of oil out of every fifty and a similar proportion in abalones. Then I looked around for something to do, didn’t find it, spent a great deal of my money unnecessarily in so looking for a job, shipped at last as cook on a coasting schooner, was discharged before she left the wharf, my grade of culinary work not reaching to the level of the captain’s refined taste.